Their planned business model was public knowledge, though, and it was disappointing enough. The only thing Altus was going to give away for free was the ability to make things that you could sell. Of course, nothing could be bought with anything but their currency, which they controlled.
A few weeks after I arrived, every employee got a headset with the Altus software loaded onto it. The Altus induction signal we received did not provide access to anything except the development platform (which is what Andy was using in his last chapter) and a few stock objects. I was never even tempted to put my headset on, but it was so fundamental to the culture of Altus that every single person with access spent every available moment inside the Space that I pretended to use the system as much as anyone else.
After hours, nearly every employee of Altus closed themselves in their rooms to play in the development space and have god knows what done to their brains by this company. The initially jovial feel of Altus completely evaporated after headsets were distributed, as people spent less and less time in public spaces. But that was actually good for me . . . it made it easier to sneak around.
I was a spy, and my intel gathering was going very well. It’s true that Altus kept a close eye on me, but they also needed my skills, and I was working on a project that was about successfully encoding memories so that one person could live another person’s experiences!
So when I say the Open Access Space was child’s play, that’s what I mean.
But every piece of communications infrastructure I could find was locked down. It wasn’t like, “You can’t hack this computer”; it was like, “You can’t touch this computer.” Computers that connected to the actual internet were literally behind doors guarded by armed men.
I still had my international cell phone, which I’d kept charged. I had taken it for an evening run once, which felt very risky, but there was no cell phone signal anywhere.
Which brings me to my absolutely ludicrous plan.
See, there was a soda carbonator in the rec room. We didn’t have any good ways of getting replacement cartridges, but we did have big-ass carbon dioxide tanks in the lab. So once or twice a week, whoever finished a CO2 canister would take it to the lab and refill it from one of the big tanks. But here’s the thing: You can put any gas into one of those canisters—it doesn’t have to be CO2.
So one day, I went to carbonate a bottle of water and an empty canister was sitting next to the carbonator. I grabbed it and put it in my bag. I went to the lab, did my work, and then, around lunch, told my supervisor I’d be a bit because I needed to refill the canister.
All of our gas tanks were stored outside in the same area, and since refilling the SodaStream canisters was such a common chore, one of the big CO2 tanks had the adapter screwed onto it all the time now.
While standing in the wide-open air in full sunlight where anyone could walk by at any moment, I grabbed a wrench and removed the adapter from the carbon dioxide tank. In the Caribbean humidity, my hands sweaty, heart pounding, I attached the adapter to a low-pressure hydrogen tank and started filling the purged CO2 canister with an extremely dangerous, flammable gas.
“There you are!” I jumped and turned around to see Sippy and Peanut.
“Jesus,” I said, “you scared me.” Now, unless you looked at the labels, all of these tanks looked roughly the same, so I wasn’t immediately hosed. “I’m just filling up the SodaStream canister,” I said, because what else would I be doing!
“Yeah, that’s what your supervisor told us,” Sippy said. “So, we have news, you want to tell her?”
Peanut looked better, but his confidence had clearly taken a hit by him being “incompatible” with the Altus Space. That’s the language people here used, “compatible” or “incompatible.” People like Peanut were quietly called “incoms.” There were only a few known incoms, and they were thought of with a mix of pity and neglect. Loving Altus Space was such a central part of the identity here you could sense people’s discomfort at the idea of incoms even existing. As far as I knew, no one else knew about Peanut yet.
And since most people spent their evenings in the Altus Space now, Peanut was left tremendously bored. Sippy had, somewhat valiantly, mostly kept out of the Space in order to keep Peanut company, but I didn’t know how long it could last.
“I want to try and get back in,” Peanut said.
I swallowed. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” I said, looking at Sippy, not at Peanut, but also thinking mostly about the little hydrogen canister hissing quietly as it filled behind me.
“No, I mean, of course not. It was bad, but I could go through it again. It was just a nightmare. It all happened in my brain, not in my body.” His shoulders were hunched forward, and he looked even littler than he was in another of his ill-fitting knitted wool hats.
“I don’t know that there’s actually any difference between what happens in our minds and in our bodies,” I told him.
“I get it, but it can’t hurt to try, right?” His Alabama accent was more apparent than usual. “So I’m going to try again tonight. Can you be there?”
I didn’t know what to say, both because I didn’t really understand the question and because I kinda already had plans for that night. Also, I had just built a small bomb behind me and would probably go to Altus jail if anyone found out.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
A strain came onto Peanut’s face as he searched for an answer.
Sippy, confident in his skin, with his muscles and his perfectly straight black hair, answered this one: “Look, I think it’s just nice
